Executive Chef David Garcelon on his rooftop herb garden at the Fairmont Royal York Hotel, Toronto, Canada, Sept 2009I've known chef David Garcelon for almost 15 years now. Since we met when he was the executive chef at the Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge, he's move on to the Fairmont Royal York, and now he's the Director of Culinary (ie. executive chef) at the Waldorf-Astoria. His love of food and gardening has also made him the chef who is leading the chef-beekeeper trend in North American hotels.

This spring, just as my book was hitting the shelves, David made a great video to congratulate me on the publication of Food and the City. I wrote about his bees at the Fairmont Royal York in the chapter 6. Technically, this chapter is about Paris, but there's a sub-section on urban beekeeping and so I shoe-horned the story about David's 14th floor rooftop bees at the Fairmont Royal York in Toronto into the "Paris" chapter.

A couple of weeks ago, David's beekeeping program at the Waldorf-Astoria hit the papers both in Canada and in the US. Here's an excerpt and a link to the story.

"If all goes well, there could be as many as 300,000 bees camping out at the Waldorf this summer." -- excerpt from a recent article about the rooftop bees at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York. Read the article.

And here's David Garcelon with his video message to me, shot in February, just before the bees arrived on the rooftop of the hotel.